


The Devil for His Own

by regencysnuffboxes (malicegeres)



Category: Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: And I'm Still Shitty At Tags!, Anyway Guess What We're Unionizing Hell!, Comrade Crowley, Established Relationship, Labor Unions, M/M, Mentions of Torture But Nothing Graphic, Podfic Welcome, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-05-18
Updated: 2020-02-19
Packaged: 2020-03-07 14:10:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 18,903
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18874798
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/malicegeres/pseuds/regencysnuffboxes
Summary: After the End of Time failed to come, there was a rebellion in Hell. This story is its history, more or less.So, like, what if Hell decided to unionize?





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This may be a terrible, terrible mistake to start writing now, but one of the writers of How I Met Your Mother said something deeply stupid about the movie Casablanca, which I am blatantly stealing some of the structure of this fic from (although not strictly so don't @ me about who's supposed to be a direct correlation to who or whatever) so I figured spite was as good a motivator as any to get started. I barely have an outline, let's do this shit.

> _Money speaks for money, the Devil for his own_
> 
> _Who comes to speak for the skin and the bone?_
> 
> _What a comfort to the widow, a light to the child,_
> 
> _There is power in a union._
> 
> _\- There is Power in a Union_ by Billy Bragg, 1986 (based on the 1913 song by Joe Hill of the Industrial Workers of the World)

History is often discussed as an arc or a cycle. To the collective human mind it is a thing that marches with intention, a logical progression of events leading inevitably to an unknown conclusion. This is untrue. History only appears to have any sort of intention because history is, at its core, a story. A narrative.

In actuality, nothing about the past was inevitable until it was the past, and it was intentional only in the sense that events considered history tend to happen when one group of people's intentions win out over another’s. If one views history not as an arc or a cycle but as a series of events that build on one another as they happen, one begins to see patterns that challenge not just the inevitability of the past, but the inevitability of the present. And when one looks at history not as a story but as a record of intermingled, successive choices made by people, one might come to the conclusion that the way things are aren't the way things ought to be, or even have to continue being now.

This same conclusion could theoretically be drawn by any being with free will who knows their history well.

In the Beginning, there was a rebellion in Heaven. Lucifer and his followers were cast out from Heaven into Hell, and Lucifer became the King of Hell. He swore revenge against Heaven, and so his followers have battled God's angels for the souls of men on Earth ever since. This is the history of the Powers that Be. It is not the whole truth of the events that took place.

After the rebellion in Heaven, there was a rebellion in Hell.

The leaders of the rebellion in Heaven came from the First and Second Spheres—those angels with enough power to feel they could speak out—but the bulk of the soldiers had come from the lowest Third Sphere. Lucifer promised the angelic masses that, if they banded together, they could seize power from the angels above them and build a Host that better served everyone's needs. The lower angels had followed, seduced by the prospect of agency over their own lives. Even in Hell, in the moments after the initial Descent, many of the fallen believed Lucifer had their best interests at heart.

A schism formed in the lower ranks of Hell. As the series of events happened, there were no clear-cut sides. The fallen angels found each other and made alliances that split off into loose entities that largely resembled sides. Intentions varied from group to group, angel to angel, even on the same supposed side. Even now, there exist in Hell friendships that were formed from these shared intentions, rivalries forged among the ranks that persist in little ways to this very day. These formations and forgings really happened, and their importance endures, but this history is a thing that must be digestible for the human mind. It can only contain so much of the truth at once.

This is the history often left out of the grander history: a schism formed in the lower ranks of Hell between those who sought power for themselves, and those who sought to seize power from those who had it and distribute it evenly amongst those of their rank.

As things happened there were those on the first side who hoped to use the power they sought for the sake of their fellow demon, and those on the second who joined to take advantage of the chaos or who would only believe power should be distributed evenly amongst their fellow demons so long as things were going their own way. The bulk of Hell were merely bystanders in this massive conflict between the two smaller groups. These nuances, too, are too many to be contained in the history being told. And so the history being told concludes thus: those who sought power for themselves won, and those who sought to redistribute that power were cast into the deepest pit of Hell to suffer until the End of Time.

After the End of Time failed to come, there was a rebellion in Hell. This story is its history, more or less.

 


	2. Chapter 2

Crowley was sprawled lengthwise on his sofa, hands clasped over the food baby that was currently threatening to pop the buttons of his shirt. [1] His eyes were shut, and his head was resting in the soft expanse of Aziraphale's lap while the angel played with his hair.

Aziraphale hummed contentedly. “Might we have a bit of music, dearest?”

He flinched at the prospect of turning on any sort of electric media, a motion he transitioned smoothly into an indulgent stretch so Aziraphale wouldn’t catch on. Then he snapped his fingers and the sweet twinkle of Chopin’s Piano Sonata No. 2 in B-flat Major began flowing from his unplugged speakers.

“Ah,” Aziraphale sighed. He took Crowley’s other hand and kissed the back of it softly. “Lovely.”

“Me or Chopin?"

"Well, initially I meant you, but at least Chopin kept me company in the nineteenth century." [2]

Crowley opened his eyes and glowered up at Aziraphale. "I suppose I deserved that one. I'm here now, though."

Aziraphale smiled down at him. "Yes, and what a wonderful now it is."

"Stop," Crowley groaned, fighting a grin. It had been five years since Armageddon failed to come, and Crowley thanked his lucky stars every day that it hadn't. He pushed back with his legs until he was sitting up in Aziraphale's lap, and he kissed him. "I love you," he said.

"I love you, too," said Aziraphale without hesitation. He leaned in and took a turn initiating a kiss. This one was longer, deeper, and it was infused with a tantalizing invitation to more.

He met the invitation with force, pushing _yes, yes, yes_ into every kiss as hard as he could. Aziraphale’s hand took hold of his head and Crowley shifted himself off his lap, positioning himself to pull Aziraphale down. He—

CROWLEY.

In 2009, fourteen years after the events of this history took place, an Austrian composer programmed a machine that translated MIDI files of human speech into notes for the piano to play. This was achieved by creating a mechanical peg for every key of the piano, allowing the machine to combine pitches that the human ear could then translate into an approximation of the original recording. For some reason, this composer decided to use a recording of a child reading out the Proclamation of the European Criminal Court. The result sounded something like the ghost of a little boy whose soul was trapped in a piano by an evil witch.

The jury is out on whether that sound was objectively better or worse than an actual demon manipulating pitch in a similar manner, but for Crowley the context really swayed him in favor of the creepy child. He recoiled from Aziraphale and sat rod-straight, clasping his hands to keep them from shaking. “Yes, lord?” he squeaked.

PERFORMANCE REVIEW. WE EXPECT YOU IN THE NEXT TWO HOURS OR THERE WILL BE CONSEQUENCES.

“R-right, my lord. Sssssee you ssssoon.”

The piano resumed its less horrifying melody, and Crowley collapsed against the back of the sofa, shutting his eyes. “Guess our date’s being cut a little short. Sorry, angel.”

“Crowley…” said Aziraphale slowly. “Didn’t you just have a performance review two weeks ago?”

Crowley opened his eyes and looked at him. “Yeah?”

“I thought this was monthly.”

“Er.”

“ _Crowley._ ”

Crowley threw up his hands. “So I get a lot of surprise performance reviews! It’s just a new policy, angel, there’s nothing to worry about.”

Aziraphale took one of his hands and held it loosely. His brows furrowed. “My dear, you’re trembling.”

“I’m fine,” Crowley snapped, pulling his hand away.

He sat back in shock. “Are you being punished for Armageddon?”

Crowley let out a breath. “No,” he said.

“Because if you are, I need to know about it. If Hell’s made a move, Crowley, that means Heaven—“

“It’s not for Armageddon,” he reassured him. “They’re ignoring that same as your lot.”

Aziraphale relaxed slightly and put a hand on his knee. “But you are being punished?”

“I killed a Duke of Hell,” said Crowley, taking a shaky breath. “They can’t just let something like that slide. Honestly I ought to be dead for it. It could be worse."

“ _It could be worse,_ ” Aziraphale repeated, his face pulled near to splitting in half between worry and fury. “How long has this been happening?"

Technically, it had been happening since six months after the Apocalypse That Wasn't. Hell had sent a pair of demons with hellhounds ready for the hunt to pick him up at his flat. He made a run for it, of course, but he was caught. What he expected next was that he'd stand trial before the Dark Council before being tossed into the Pit with the demons from the Second Rebellion, but instead he was taken bleeding and broken from the hellhound attack to the downtown business center of Pandemonium. [3]

Hell was somewhat feudal in nature, and it didn't run on capital, strictly speaking, but it did the seek profit of a sort in the form of human souls. Thus, the division of Hell that dealt with the acquisition of said profit fell to Mammon, Prince of Hell, Emissary of Greed, and Chief Financial Officer of Perdition. Crowley technically worked under her, but he'd only met her a handful of times after receiving a particularly high-profile commendation. He wasn't a fan of Hell's upper management, strictly speaking, but he'd always respected her. Since she had to understand Earth on some level, he thought she got things—and him—a bit more than the other demons of her rank did.

She'd even come to his defense early on. They'd wanted to give Crowley a barony as a reward for the Fall of Humankind, but the whole point of his going up to Earth had been that he wouldn't have to stay in Hell anymore. He thought he could best serve their Dark Lord on Earth, he told them. It felt like a calling for him, and he'd very much like to continue ensuring the damnation of God's favored creation if their lordships would allow it. Most of the Lords of Hell had been insulted, but Mammon must have seen something in him because she'd spoken up for him. Said that if the little snake wanted to stay on doing something he was clearly good at, they'd be fools to make him do anything else.

A flicker of hope flared up in Crowley's heart as he recalled the incident, but he stamped it out quickly. He was in favor of hope, generally speaking, but if he was right about how this was going to go he thought it best to keep his expectations down in the Pit. Mammon sipped something that definitely wasn’t coffee out of her mug, peering at Crowley through the steam. Her face was pale and pointed, dark hair pulled up in a tight bun, and she wore a crisp black pantsuit with shoulder pads that were as sturdy as armor.

“Well, Crowley,” she sighed, “you’ve put me in a rather awkward position. I’ve always liked you, you know. You’re smart. You go for what you want, and the things you want have only ever worked to Hell’s advantage up to now.” She set her mug down and leaned forward, folding her hands primly on the desk. “I warned you not to put me in a position like this again, because after Eden the other princes talked. ‘That Crawly,’ they said, ‘I don’t trust him, I think he’s dangerous, he hangs around the wrong sorts of people. His loyalty isn’t with the Lords of Hell.’

“And I lied for you, little snake. I pointed out that you’d been the first to volunteer to scout, that your little friends hadn’t been found guilty of anything and you’d seemed happy enough to leave them at the first opportunity. But I didn’t do that because I thought you were a loyal servant of Hell; I lied because I knew you’d do anything to stay out of here. That you hated Hell more than you wanted to be crawling around down here with the other worms who might try to plot against us. And that was alright, Crowley. I didn’t think I needed your loyalty, just for you to be useful.

 “And then you went and killed Ligur. Our hands are tied as far as what happened with the Antichrist is concerned—Heaven hasn’t made a move, and if we make the first one it could escalate very quickly in a way we won’t be able to control. I tried to warn the others off of giving the task to you, you know. I couldn’t tell them why, of course, and it’s hard to blame you when I’ve always known your nature. But you killed a Duke of Hell, Crowley, and you did it with holy water you must already have had on hand. That speaks to a some amount of premeditation. It makes me wonder whether I was wrong about your loyalties. And, if word gets out that it was you who did it, it’s going to give your old friends the idea that they ought to try to do the same.”

She leaned back in her tall executive chair, placing her folded hands in her lap. “But, despite everything, I still want to like you, and I think you could still be useful, and I don’t like to be embarrassed or disappointed.” She smiled coldly. “So do what you do best, Serpent. Help me keep my best tempter. Tell me why I shouldn't have you thrown in the Pit and be done with it. Talk.”

Crowley took a deep breath, considering his next words _very_ carefully. "I was only trying to stay out of Hell, just like you say. Hastur and Ligur were going to make that difficult for me, so I did what I had to for my own self-defense."

Mammon raised an eyebrow. "And the holy water?"

"Paranoia," he said with a dismissive shrug, wincing as the motion pulled at a wound on his arm. "Although it turned out I was right, in the end, didn't it?"

"Crowley, Crowley, Crowley." She tutted. "You're hiding something. Have you got interests up there that go against Hell?" A cat-like grin spread over her narrow face. "A certain angel, perhaps?"

Under the desk, out of Mammon's line of sight, Crowley squeezed his fist so tight his nails nearly broke the skin of his palm. He had to tell her something, of course, but he couldn't let on just how much was at stake or she'd try to use Aziraphale against him.  He made show of taking a deep breath and leaning against the desk, and again he spoke with great caution.

"The angel and I, we had an Arrangement, see. We realized we were about evenly matched and it was a waste of time and resources to keep fighting each other. We came to the conclusion that instead of working against one another we could give each other space and get the same amount of work done without putting in nearly as much effort. We helped each other out a few times, too," he added desperately. "Sometimes he did things I would have been doing for Hell, and it was my idea so to my mind that's a pretty solid temptation. An angel doing the Devil's work, see?"

Mammon's other eyebrow joined the first. "Well," she said, pursing her lips. "I was right about the lack of loyalty."

"I'm not defending it," Crowley continued, babbling now, "but you can see I didn't keep the holy water around because I'm part of some plot to overthrow the Lords of Hell. I don't even talk to that lot you were worried about, anymore. Haven't so much as bumped into them in centuries. It was insurance, that's all."

"Hm." She crossed her arms over her chest, her shoulder pads staying perfectly in place. Then she reached out a hand and began to tap the long, black talons on her fingers against the desk. "You've certainly proven you'll do anything to stay on Earth. I can work with that. Make no mistake, Crowley, there are going to be consequences no matter what, and I will personally ensure that they are severe, but I think I can put in a word to the Dark Council that I don’t wish to lose you to the Pit just yet. And if you disappoint me again, I won't be giving you another chance."

And so the performance reviews began. He'd told Aziraphale that much, of course, that he was on probation for killing Ligur and that it wasn't something Aziraphale needed to worry about. He didn't tell him that Hell tended to call him down completely at random. It was once a month for some periods of time, but sometimes it was once a week, or even days apart if they were feeling particularly cruel. They once went two years without a performance review, just long enough to make him start to wonder whether they'd finally forgotten him until the moment they called him down again.

He also didn't tell him about Hastur. It was Hastur's partner in crime he'd killed, the Dark Council had reasoned, so as long as they were keeping Crowley around it should be Hastur who got to dole out his punishment personally. It was only fair, after all, as the punishment had to remain secret so nobody would know a low-ranked demon had been the one to do Ligur in. Hastur wasn't allowed to kill him, and he wasn't allowed to do any visible or permanent damage or do anything to put Crowley out of work, but otherwise he was the one who got to coordinate with Mammon on Crowley's performance reviews, and he took special pleasure in the time he was permitted to do almost anything he wished to make Crowley suffer.

And then he had to come back up to Earth and pretend nothing was wrong. Usually he went back to his flat and drank, if he could get away with it. If he couldn't come up with a good excuse to cancel plans with Aziraphale, he suffered through them and saved the breakdown for when he could get away. But he couldn't let on to Aziraphale, because he really was lucky, and it wasn't as though Aziraphale could help him, so he thought it was best if Aziraphale was kept in the dark altogether on the subject.

Aziraphale had his hand over his mouth in shock, and he lowered it when Crowley explained this to him. "There has to be something we can do. You could—"

" _No_ ," said Crowley. "I got off practically scot-free. There isn't a better alternative, alright? This is the better alternative. It's just the way it's got to be."

"Crowley—"

He stood up. "I've got to go. If I'm late Hastur gets me for longer, and I do _not_ fancy seeing what he could do with extra time."

Aziraphale stood as well and took his hand. He stared at him for a long moment, deliberating on what to say, and then he lifted his other hand to Crowley's face and cradled his cheek. "Come back," he said softly.

"I will," he promised. He pulled him into one last kiss, and then he turned away and left, trying to resist looking back as the dread began to sour the lovely meal still sitting in his stomach.

* * *

[1] Said culinary child had been conceived in a lovely little Greek restaurant down the road called Taste of Athens, and Crowley was thinking of naming it after Socrates, or Aristotle, or Epicurus, or one of his other Athenian exes. He’d voiced these suggestions aloud earlier, but Aziraphale didn't seem to think they were particularly funny.

[2] Aziraphale had shared an umbrella with Chopin at a train station one rainy day in 1841. The train took a long time to arrive and Aziraphale had settled in for what he thought was going to be a long, fascinating conversation, but then he'd gone and showed him an early version of one of his magic tricks and the composer suddenly remembered he'd forgotten his pocketbook at the village pub. Crowley, however, didn't need to know any of this.

[3] Like London, Pandemonium began as a sort of military encampment of new settlers and sprawled into what it is now out of necessity. Streets wound around each other and ended at illogical places, rivers (of boiling sulfur, in this case) were long ago diverted underground to make way for new buildings, and much like London its drivers were—literally or metaphorically—demons. Apart from Lucifer’s palace at the center and the business area downtown, Pandemonium was also home to locales such as a bustling Torments district, a booming industrial center, a quaint little imp neighborhood, and a vibrant queer village where demons of that persuasion could enjoy a night out of bad dancing to good music by some of Hell’s more famous damned.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Full credit to Paige (they-handed-me-the-moon on Tumblr) for the headcanon about Hell offering Crowley a promotion after Eden. Thanks for reading, all!


	3. Chapter 3

It is a well-documented fact that London's size and scale isn't limited to what can be seen flying above it. There's the Tube, of course, and the sewers, not to mention hidden rivers, Roman foundations, lost remains of humans and other creatures long dead. More than one fantasy author has pitched theories of what else might lurk beneath London, and some of those theories are closer to the truth than one might reasonably suspect. [1] For example, there are a number of tunnels that, if you follow them long enough and take enough wrong turns, lead you directly to Hell. They're a hazard to urban explorers who go a bit too deep, but for a demon based out of London they're terribly convenient when one needs to make a quick trip Downstairs from Earth or vice versa. So, due to proximity, over the years a number of pubs have become hubs of demonic activity.

The Black Goat in Knightsbridge is one such institution. [2] Crowley didn't frequent it all that regularly, as he tended to avoid other demons whenever possible, but it was the closest place to where he'd popped back up on Earth that served alcohol. He wasn't ready to go back to his flat in the likely event Aziraphale was there waiting to confront him on lying for the last five years. Or, worse, try to comfort him. Comfort was the _last_ thing Crowley needed. Letting himself go soft in Aziraphale’s arms would just make it all worse the next time it happened. No, what he needed was a drink, and he needed it immediately. He went straight for an isolated seat at the far end of the bar, barely noticing the other demons staring as he came in and only stepping outside of his head long enough to order two shots of whiskey and a gin martini [3] to nurse once he’d gotten the quicker alcohol into him. And for a while that was all he did, drink and try not to think.

Then, halfway through his third martini, a voice to his left interrupted him. “Crowley?”

He looked up. “Auron?” He squinted at the other demon through the haze of drink. “What’re you doing up here? Don’t you work Torments?”

Auron jerked their thumb at a table behind them. “Been talking to some of the younger ones. They like to get topside whenever they can, you know?”

Crowley laughed. “What are you, their after-school counselor?”

And then he turned around and looked at the table, and he stopped laughing. There were four people—or things that looked like people, anyway—who seemed to have just finished scattering their gazes so he wouldn’t catch them staring at him. And all four of them had bodies.

The bodies were the first thing that got Crowley’s mind racing. Hell didn’t issue bodies out to younger demons. They were imps, demons so far down the ladder even someone as low as Crowley was allowed to step on them. God’s initial plans for humanity had been part of the reason for the rebellion in Heaven and, well, younger demons weren’t much more than damned humans who’d gotten a promotion. Hell usually set them to work doing menial tasks in Torments, and if they were allowed up to Earth they had to go and find bodies to possess themselves. But these bodies each only held one soul. If Hell was issuing them bodies, that meant they were up to something.

Which brought him to the second thing giving him pause: the staring. He turned his head slowly around the room and saw countless eyes darting away from him as he did so. The whole bloody bar was staring at him, and here he was sat with Auron of all people. He turned back around and sobered up quietly.

"Funny running into you on Earth," he said. "It's been ages.” The tone he used was even, bordering on flippant, but he knew Auron could pick up the desperate undercurrent.

"It has," Auron agreed. Their face remained stoic, only a slight twitch of their brows indicating that they understood him. "We should catch up, sometime."

Crowley hummed. "Maybe. I've got a lot on my plate, these days." He held a hand out to the other demon. "Good seeing you."

Auron took it firmly in theirs, giving it a single shake. "Take care."

To the outside observer, it looked like they were sharing a warm but casual handshake before one went back to their table and the other went back to his drink. Auron spoke to their companions as though nothing unusual had passed between them and Crowley, and Crowley finished his martini and left without a second glance at any of the demons in the pub. What the outside observer might have missed was the business card Crowley manifested into Auron's hand with his phone number and home address.

He drove around the block once, reaching his senses out for any sort of presence infernal or divine. When he was certain the coast was clear he went straight to his flat, drew the blinds, and waited. An hour and a half later, someone buzzed his flat. He got up and walked mechanically to the speaker on the wall.

"Hello?"

"Oh, good, it worked!" said a bright voice on the other line. "I've been looking for this place for ages. London really does need better city planning. Wait. Is that you, Crowley?"

He sighed. Auron was bright, but they didn't spend all that much time topside. "Yeah, it's me. I'm going to press a button that hangs up on you and unlocks the door. I'm on the fourth floor, flat number's on the card. Got it?"

"I think so."

He let them in, and was grateful when he heard a soft knock at his door. Crowley ushered them inside quickly, putting a finger to his lips. When they nodded, he went about the room looking for electronics to unplug. Then he realized not a single one of them was plugged in in the first place. With a sigh, he started turning them all off manually.

Then Auron waved a hand and the electricity in Crowley's flat went out.

Crowley stared at them through the darkness. [4] "Oh," he said. "Just the flat, or the whole building?"

"Whole building. Is that a problem?"

"Er, it might be." He waved a hand and brought the electricity back for his neighbors, leaving only his flat dark. Then he looked at Auron and grimaced. "Of all the demon pubs in all the towns in all the world, you walk into mine, eh?”

"Are you in trouble?" they asked, never one to beat around the bush.

Crowley raised an eyebrow. "I was at the Black Goat. _Me_. What does that tell you?"

Auron sat down on the sofa and gave him a sympathetic look. "That you were just in Hell and badly needed a drink, I suppose."

"Spot on." He sat down in a sleek, white upholstered chair across from them. "What were _you_ doing there?"

"You know how I like to take the youngsters under my wing," they said innocently.

"In bodies, Auron. Proper, Hell-issued corporations. Why are they assigning those to lower demons like that?"

"I've been wondering that myself. It's a new policy, you see. They said that since the world failed to end, they wanted to try a new approach to handling said world. And what better way to spice things up than by giving the former humans a little more self-sufficiency by assigning bodies short-term when they come up here?"

"'Former humans,'" Crowley repeated. "Ssssshit."

Auron's brows knitted together with concern. "You think this is something to do with you?"

Crowley pulled off his sunglasses and met their eyes. "I need you to tell me what you were talking about to those demons, Auron. Please."

Auron started at the sight of Crowley's eyes. They always did, and Crowley always forgot that they bothered them. He tried not to take it personally, as Auron was one of the few beings alive who remembered what they looked like before, but for a moment he worried whether he'd miscalculated. Only for a moment though, because Auron answered, "I'm taking the temperature among the lower ranks. What you did, Crowley, it got people talking. For the older ones among us, it got us remembering."

"No, no, no, no, no." He buried his face in his hands. "I gave the bastards six thousand years of my life. I made myself indispensable to stay out of the Pit, and now the Lords of Hell are trying to make me obsolete so they can throw me in there with the other traitors."

"They can't," Auron reassured him. "I know you, Crowley, you're good at keeping your nose clean. As long as Heaven doesn't punish that angel you were working with, Hell can't put you away."

Crowley met their eyes again, feeling helpless. Mammon hadn't been afraid of demons getting ideas from Crowley stopping the end of the world; she'd been afraid they'd get ideas because he killed Ligur and lived to tell the tale. And Auron was an agitator. They knew how to get people to follow them, to rethink the way they saw the world. In Auron's hands, Crowley's transgression could become a powerful weapon.

Auron studied his face. "I've been hearing some rumors," they said hesitantly. "Duke Ligur disappeared in all that Apocalypse kerfuffle, and nobody's quite sure where he's gone. Some people are saying he was killed. You wouldn't know anything about that, would you?"

His eyes darted involuntarily to the spot in front of his office door that he'd scrubbed clean five years before, and then he made a calculation. Auron was an agitator, yes, but Crowley knew them. It had been a good, long time since they'd last seen each other, but there were fundamental things about a person that even the centuries couldn't wear away.

He sucked his breath in through his teeth. "I might know a thing or two."

Auron's face hardly moved, but there was awe in their voice. "Was it the angel?" they half-whispered.

"Not directly. Holy water. I, er, kept it around in case things ever went south." He threw up a hand. "Which they did, obviously."

"How are you not—?"

"Mammon, same as last time. She knows I'm too much of a coward to, you know, use what I did to try and incite a rebellion." He gave Auron a significant look. "Whatever rumors you're hearing, I need you to shut them down wherever you can so the other Princes don't decide to overrule her. I've worked too hard to stay up here for my name to get tied up in whatever it is you're planning."

Their face hardened. "I haven't used your name. You know I wouldn't do that to you."

"I know," Crowley sighed. "I'm not accusing you of anything, Auron, I'm asking you for help." His voice broke on the word 'help,' and he squeezed his eyes shut with embarrassment.

There was a short silence. Then, Crowley felt the weight of a warm hand on his knee. He opened his eyes and saw Auron sitting across from him on the coffee table, their expression intent. "I can try to slow the rumors down, but that's all I can do. People are going to think what they think. And, honestly, I don't know if you can afford half-measures like this in your situation. If Hell stays the way it is now, the Lords of Hell are going find some excuse to throw you in the Pit no matter what you do. It's only a matter of time. But, Crowley, that's because the Lords of Hell are afraid of you. They know that you _could_ incite something, and that there's a part of you that might not be too cowardly to do it if you thought it was the right thing to do. If you—"

Crowley smacked Auron's hand away and stood. "No."

Auron sighed and stood as well. "You're wrong, you know. A coward wouldn't do what you did with all the armies of Heaven and Hell watching you."

"I only did it because I thought I had nothing left to lose!" he protested. "We've been down this road before, Auron. It doesn't end well. Twice, now, it's ended with _Hell_. I don't want to know how much worse it could get."

"Things are different now. We've got humans on our side. Humans who've done this and won, Crowley. It doesn’t have to be a full revolution yet, just a bit of improvement in the way we’re treated. If we're strategic, we can make things a little better without getting anyone else thrown in the Pit.”

Crowley had to laugh at that. "So, what, are we forming a union? Going on strike? Are we going to start demanding lunch breaks and pensions?”

Auron gave him a small smile, the sort that was clearly the best cover they could place in front of a full grin. “Something like that.”

His face fell. “You can’t be serious. Auron, the reason unions work is they use capitalism against itself. Hell isn’t capitalist, it hasn’t got money or an economy. What have we got to collectively bargain with?”

“Souls are as good a currency as any,” they replied with a quirk of their brow. "We're meant to collect them and torment them, and if we don't do either then Hell's not really doing its job, is it?"

“This is completely bloody-minded. I was there when the humans were first unionizing, you know. There was blood, lots of it, and the people in power have never stopped trying to take back what the workers won.”

“Something has got to give, Crowley. Neither of us is going to be in the picture much longer if it doesn’t. I'm trying to be strategic, here, and this is just the first step.”

“Oh, steps!” he crowed. He clasped his hands together in a mockery of glee. “A revolutionary program! We’re doing Trotskyism now!”

Auron tapped their chin. “We haven’t recruited Trotsky off the rack, yet, I don’t think. Is he someone to talk to?”

Crowley stared at them. “Bloody hell, no, not _Trotsky_. That's a terrible idea, he's completely full of shit. What other humans have you got from the Russian Revolution? We’ve already had one brutal despot in Hell, we don’t need _Stalin_ taking Lucifer’s place because people listened to Lenin and his lot. Again.”

The shield came off of Auron’s grin, and they laughed a bright laugh. “There’s the Crowley I know. You’d be such an asset to us; somebody who remembers where the first two rebellions went wrong and who knows about all these theories the younger demons have been telling me about.”

“Yeah, I know about those theories, and I know how revolutions work,” Crowley spat. “They’d be lovely, if Heaven, Hell, and the U.S. government ever allowed them to be put into practice. Power wins every single time, that’s how it always works. As Above, so below, and even moreso Below that. That’s the point of Hell, Auron, it’s a punishment. Even if we managed to make things better, do you think Heaven would let us keep that? If word got out that Hell was suddenly an alright place to be, they’d invade us immediately because we’ve messed with ineffability or some flimsy excuse like that because the real problem is we'd threaten Heaven's dominance."

Auron's smile faded to black. “Do you honestly want to go to the Pit without finding out for yourself what happens if we try?” they asked, their words clipped. “You said you only did what you did because you had nothing left to lose. What have you got to lose now when you're teetering over the edge once again?”

Crowley gestured around his flat. “Everything! Earth is my _home_ , Auron! My life is up here, not Down There. I can't go sticking nose into fights that haven't been mine in thousands of years.”

“Your fellow demons, your comrades, finally have a chance to have what you do—“

“Stop it! I am no one’s bloody comrade, alright? The whole point of me going up to Earth was I’d finally be out of things, or have you forgotten what it was like right after the last two uprisings failed?”

He saw Auron get geared up to argue, but then they deflated, closing their dark eyes with a heavy sigh. “I know why you’re hesitant to trust me. I understand, and I’m not going to force you to get involved after everything that’s happened to you.” They looked at him. “But something is going to force you, Crowley, one way or another. And when it does, I want you to remember who gave you a choice.”

Crowley nodded. “And the rumors?”

“Like I said, I’ll do my best.”

“Thank you,” he said, relaxing. “Look, whatever it is you’re doing, do it carefully. I don't like things the way they are, either, but we can't afford to lose whatever agency we've got left in another gamble against powers that have always been."

They sighed, disappointment plain on their face. "I'll be careful. I'm just sorry to hear that's how you see the odds."

When they were finally gone, Crowley turned all the lights back on in his flat and collapsed onto the sofa. There had been a time he'd had hope for Hell. It was just that he'd learned from experience, and what his experience told him was the only shot he had at happiness was on Earth. Auron couldn't understand that. Hell was all they had.

He groaned and buried his face in his hands again.

That was the thing about Auron, they always made Crowley feel a bit like a kid who'd grown up in a rough neighborhood and gotten out on a full ride scholarship. He'd worked hard, sure, but no harder than anyone else who wanted to take a crack at a new life on Earth. He'd just been in the right place at the right time and known the right people, and the right people had happened to be Auron. They'd also been the wrong people, of course, one of his friends in Heaven who'd backed the wrong side, but that was why they'd worked so hard to get Crowley up to Earth in the first place. They felt guilty for dragging Crowley down with them, and Crowley felt guilty for leaving them behind, so things evened out too much for them to feel properly bitter toward one another. So he trusted Auron more than he trusted anyone else in Hell, but seeing them tended to draw blood from wounds that had long since scabbed over.

He wanted Aziraphale. As soon as the thought surfaced he pushed it back underwater, as had been his habit for the thousands of years he'd known the angel. Then he paused, remembering Aziraphale’s face wen he learned just what he’d had been dealing with for the past five years. Reluctantly, Crowley released the thought again, letting it gently bob back up to the surface like a duck. It wasn’t going to be an enjoyable conversation, he knew. For all they were the same, Aziraphale had never had to deal with his side losing the War and he’d never quite learned how to talk to Crowley about Hell with the level of sensitivity and patience the subject required. [5] But Aziraphale was his partner in every sense of the word now. He needed to trust that Aziraphale would listen, and for all his instincts made him doubt it he knew for a fact that Aziraphale wanted to. Besides, it was the least he could do after lying about how dire things were for half a decade.

With a wave of his hand, Crowley switched the electricity back on in his flat. Then he shut off the lights, grabbed the keys to the Bentley, and made his way out the door to head to Aziraphale's shop.

* * *

[1] Shockingly, Neil Gaiman's take isn't one of them.

[2] The human owner of the Black Goat didn't quite know what sort of clientele she was hosting, but she tended to hire stressed out university students who were too sleepy or too busy sneaking study time at work to notice whatever it was that sent more extroverted bartenders screaming.

[3] Stirred, not shaken. He had ordered it the other way once in 1967 when he’d already had a few and was feeling experimental, but he’d been disappointed to learn that shaking a martini watered down the taste. He lost a bit of respect for Mr. Bond that night, actually.

[4] Not that darkness was much of a problem for a pair of demons, but Crowley took pride in everything about his flat's interior decor including the way his lighting set the mood.

[5] Not that Aziraphale should have taken all the blame for this. Crowley had difficulty sharing anything that was affecting him without at least five protective layers of irony, preferably with a few drinks in him as well. It would have been difficult to feel out what things upset Crowley the most even if one weren’t a self-righteous angel who tended to speak first and think later.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading, everyone! Next time, to us Peej Witching's parlance, there's gonna be a bunch of Crowlore and I'm very excited to get into that shit. Also, happy Pride Eve!


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I cannot convey to you how big a pain in the ass this chapter was to write. I had a lot of headcanons to lay out, a rogue internal history major to reign in, a narrative to keep engaging, emotional notes to hit, plot-important stuff to establish, and Gilder to frame for it. I sure hope you enjoy reading this, because I worked awful hard writing it!

Aziraphale's muscles reacted to the crackle of the Bentley's wheels against wet pavement before he'd even really heard it. He placed his book face down, not even sparing a thought for the binding, and ran to the front of the shop.

In the days since he'd last seen Crowley, he'd tried to prepare himself for the worst, but in truth he didn't know what to expect. He must have seen Crowley after a bad visit to Hell at some point in the six millennia they'd known each other, but this was the demon who'd hidden five years of intermittent torture from him—and this after they'd agreed to live openly and unapologetically as a committed couple.

With that in mind, Aziraphale had prepared for Crowley to try to downplay things again. "My dear boy," he intended to say to him if he tried it, "I am your partner, and I'd like very much to be your partner in all things—even your pain. I understand that there are things you don't want to share, but we've spent the last few years building a life together and you've been lying to me for almost all of it. I find that hurtful, and it makes me wonder whether you don't trust me, or whether you're embarrassed to show weakness in front of me because, on some level, you still think of me as the enemy. I love you, Crowley, and I don't think you want to think of me that way anymore than I want you to. Now, please, have some tea and tell me what happened."

The door opened and Aziraphale steeled himself, ready to provide comfort or force a confrontation.

And then Crowley blustered past him toward the backroom shouted, "Aziraphale, we've got problems!"

He balked. Fortunately, in preparation for what he knew was going to be an emotionally fraught situation, he'd developed a helpful sort of internal monologue to sit at the back of his mind, observe events objectively, and advise him on what to do. Unfortunately, that internal monologue was still very much Aziraphale, so the thing his unemotional observer told him to do was put on his breeziest tone and ask, "How are you feeling, dearest?"

"Not great!" Crowley shouted from the other room. "Come on, seriously, we've got to figure this out right now."

"Sit down and make yourself comfortable," Aziraphale continued robotically. "I'll make us some tea."

The demon's head appeared back in the doorway. "Are you listening to me, angel?"

Faced with a direct question, Aziraphale's internal monologue began to short out. "I—My dear, you've just been _tortured_. Are—Well, don't you want some tea?"

Crowley took off his sunglasses and tucked them into the front pocket of his suit. He met Aziraphale's eyes. "Angel," he said slowly, "I need you to listen to me. As of tonight, my problems are a lot bigger than the occasional torture."

He absorbed this information and furrowed his brow, all breeziness cast aside and all helpful internal monologues tightly muzzled. "Worse how?"

Crowley took a shaky breath and leaned on the doorframe, the erratic energy he'd burst into the shop with leaving his body all at once. He looked so small, and for a moment his eyes flared with fear before he shut them. "Let's... Let's have that tea, like you said."

_Finally_. Aziraphale walked to the doorway and took Crowley's hand in his. It was cold, as it nearly always was, and Aziraphale covered it with his other hand and began trying to massage a little warmth into it. It was a habit he'd picked up since he and Crowley had started holding hands more frequently; if it was cold, he warmed it, and that was that. It was instinctual, familiar, and it seemed to ground Crowley as much as it did Aziraphale.  "Of course, my dear," he said gently. "Anything you need."

When he was settled on the couch, a warm mug held tightly in his hands, Crowley looked sidelong at Aziraphale and muttered, "I don't know where to start."

"Well, something must have happened," said Aziraphale. "Why don't you start with that?"

Crowley let out a soft grunt of frustration. "Well, what _happened_ was I ran into an old friend."

"In Hell?"

"At a demon pub, so close enough."

Aziraphale raised an eyebrow. "I'm sorry, you have pubs now?"

"I never go to them," said Crowley defensively. "I was only there tonight because I didn't want to go home right away, in case you..." He cleared his throat, and Aziraphale decided not to press the issue. "Anyway, this is an _old_ friend, right? Really, really old. I've actually known them longer than I've known you, which is why I don't know how to..." He took a deep breath and turned so that he was facing Aziraphale straight on. "You were a Cherub, back before you got demoted, right? That's where you were during the War and all. The First Sphere."

Aziraphale had just poised his mug at his lips to take a sip, but he brought his drink back down to his lap. "I don't see what this has to do with anything."

"Just bear with me, angel. What do you remember about the lead-up to everything? I mean, why do you think the rebellion happened?"

"I remember a lot of resentment of humans," said Aziraphale, dragging the old memories out from the junk drawer of his mind where he’d left them to forget. "Lucifer wanted to be closest to God, and they threatened him, so he rebelled. It was about power."

"I mean, yeah," Crowley scoffed. "Everything is power, right? [1] If you break it down to its bare essentials, I mean. And, sure, if you're looking at it from the leadership's point of view that's probably more or less accurate. But that wasn't how it looked from where I was standing."

"You've never talked about this before," said Aziraphale in a tone that made it clear he didn't particularly want to talk about it now, either.

"Well, it's never been immediately relevant before. And now that it is, I'm trying to do the whole sharing thing since you didn't seem all that keen on me hiding these things from you before."

Aziraphale looked down. There was a narrative Crowley had always bucked, that of the penitent fallen angel lamenting his own damnation, but from the moment they became friends Aziraphale clung to that narrative. He clung to it in the service of the complex calculus that allowed him to function as a servant of Heaven while loving a demon—and, he believed, that kept him from meeting the same fate as him. Of course Crowley was good, Aziraphale couldn’t deny that. But he was good because he was special, he was better than all the other demons, and deep down he _knew_ he was better. Because if Crowley was nothing special, if he didn’t mind being a demon so much as the things Heaven and the higher-ups of Hell did to make demons’ lives difficult, then there was nothing stopping Aziraphale from asking the same questions and descending the same way. He probably deserved that descent for the hand he’d played in Crowley’s unhappiness as his enemy.

But he remembered the look on Crowley's face when that summons from Hell had come in and cast his fears aside. "Alright," he said. "What did it look like to you?

It is here that a more streamlined secondary source narrative might benefit the reader more than an exact transcript of the history as dictated to the angel Aziraphale by the demon Crowley.

Oral histories are often overlooked as biased and imperfect sources, but the same can be said of letters, diary entries, and other records given credence over a medium that is often the most accessible way to preserve history for marginalized and ephemeral communities. There are cultures without written languages whose whole histories and even geographies have been preserved through songs and poems passed down the generations; without oral history the world would lack for contemporary transgender perspectives on the 1966 Compton's Cafeteria Riot as recorded in works like the documentary _Screaming Queens_ , or contemporary rock star perspectives on the music industry in similarly important historical works such as _This Is Spinal Tap_.

That being said, oral histories are best conducted by a calm, objective interviewer whose aim is to make the subject’s interview comprehensible to a potential future audience. In this particular moment Aziraphale was not calm, it could rarely be said that he was ever objective, and readers familiar with previous histories of this angel and demon will recall that, as a unit, the two are seldom comprehensible.

Before we launch into Crowley's perspective on the War in Heaven, or Hell's First Rebellion, the non-celestial reader might find it useful to have a basic understanding of the hierarchies of Heaven.

Most hierarchies in human society exist because one person or group of people took power from another person or group of people, and they maintain and expand that power through force and exploitation. The hierarchies that exist in Heaven are real, eternal, and quite literally ordained by divine right. That being said, there is reason to believe that the hierarchies of Heaven were not initially as strict as the hierarchies that existed as of 1995 C.E. But before we explore that possibility, we must first understand the roles God assigned to Her angels.

The angels of Heaven were divided into three Spheres, and each Sphere consisted of three Choirs.

The First Sphere were created to be the servants of God. At the outer circumference of the First Sphere are the Thrones, who present the prayers of humankind to God and who at the time of Creation acted as mediators between the Second and First Spheres. At the center of the Sphere are the Cherubim, created to guard the throne of God and later the Garden of Eden. And in the center, closest to God, were the Seraphim, whose only purpose was to sing God's praises and bask in Her Light.

The Second Sphere were initially the governors of Creation, translating God's designs into instructions that the Third Sphere could follow and performing quality control on the Earth as a whole. The innermost angels of the Second Sphere are the Dominions, a sort of middle management tier of the angelic hierarchy in charge of supervising the overall work of the Third Sphere. Further out are the Virtues, attendants of the Metatron meant to clarify to the other angels what God deems virtuous and responsible for manifesting signs and miracles to humanity on Earth. Furthest out are the Thrones, the architects of the cosmos who after the War became the primary offensive force against demons.

The Third and final Sphere were the angels doing the work of Creation. The innermost angels of this sphere were the Principalities, the archangels [2], and the angels. All of them were created for purposes that would not be relevant until after Creation was complete—the Principalities would look after nations and groups of people, the archangels would be messengers to humanity, and the angels would see to the general affairs of humankind as needed—so they made up the lowest rungs of the labor force tasked with Creation. [3]

From a human perspective the First Sphere looks almost like a leisure class or an aristocracy, but this again forgets that aristocracies were established using brutality and exploitation, whereas the First Sphere was not. Similarly, the angels of the Third Sphere appear to be an early version of the human proletariat, but they were not pressed into their labor by force—at least, not at first. It's actually unclear whether God meant the hierarchy to exist in a strict succession of First, Second, and Third Sphere angels in order from most to least important based on who was closest to Her. As in all things, Her motivation is ineffable, and based on available sources the first being to suggest such a thing might have been Lucifer himself. [4]

Now, in the Beginning, time hadn't quite settled into the predictable thing it is now. A day had the potential to hold infinite moments no matter how few hours had passed, and it ended when God decided it was so. So God made all Her angels on the first day [5] and set them to work at their first tasks.

All the raw material for the universe was there, all the fire and stone and noxious gas, and it was Crowley's job to shape it into tangible things.

_"It wasn't bad work," Crowley explained to Aziraphale. "I mean, I always liked the world, even when it wasn't actually the world yet. It felt good, creating things. It wasn't the worst job I’ve ever had."_

Of the work he did in Heaven, Crowley loved the Second Day the best, but the Second Day was also when things began to go wrong. Plants were the only things alive on Earth, thus far, but already Crowley felt that something was off. One place on Earth, the place the higher angels who knew these things called Eden, seemed better-suited to life than the rest. It had abundant water, rich soil, exactly the right amount of sunlight for the first life on Earth. Everything there was greener, too, the sort of green only found in the wings and eyes of the angels of Heaven. The rest of Earth looked dull in comparison.

That night, when all the seeds of Earth were sewn and the waters were settled, was when things began to change.

Crowley began talking to his fellow angels, and some of them had questions, too. Some of them had been wondering the same thing he had, or had been told off for pausing in their work to appreciate God's wonders as the Seraphim did, or had asked the higher angels about the purpose of their work and been scolded for wondering at all.

As I have previously stated, Heaven's hierarchy doesn't come from the same place as humanity's hierarchies. God had put the angels in their places, that was an undeniable fact. What the angels of the higher Spheres didn't know that night was that, as the lower angels talked amongst themselves during the time allotted for them to rest and worship, the kindling that would fuel the very first rebellion in all Creation was piled and ready to ignite. And because they couldn't conceive of the kindling, let alone the spark, none of them suspected a thing until it was too late.

None, that is, except for the spark himself.

A new whisper began to emerge, one that confirmed everyone’s worst fears perfectly: the final step of Creation. When the work of building the world was done, God Herself would form two beings in Her own image as the lowest angels had been. Their bodies would be feeble, ephemeral things sculpted from dust to encase their immortal souls, and it was the duty of all angels to care for them and their descendants who would populate the world.

The story often goes that it was Lucifer’s jealousy of humankind that caused the War in Heaven, but this is an oversimplification. Lucifer resented humans, yes, but it could be argued that what ultimately made him rebel was that he recognized his own resentment of God’s hierarchy in the angels below him and saw an opportunity to use that resentment to rise above that hierarchy.

With the news of humankind came the information that the First and Second Spheres had known about this all along while the Third Sphere did the work of Creation with no clue what they were building, and they were only finding out now because the Lightbringer had magnanimously let it slip to a few Principalities.

By now, Crowley was mostly hanging around the other angels who were asking questions, and as the Lightbringer’s resentment of humanity trickled down into the lower spheres he began to feel uncomfortable. Some of his friends had gone off to gather a few more people to hear Lucifer speak, and he was alone with the angel who would later call themself Auron.

Auron had always had a reassuring presence about them. They were tall with strong, broad shoulders and a graceful physique that bordered on intimidating, but they had a gentle smile that stretched across the dimples of their deep brown cheeks and crinkled their bright, attentive eyes. You could say anything to them and know it wouldn’t go ignored or unacknowledged.

So, without the others there, Crowley spoke his mind. “Look,” he said to them, “all this talk about the humans replacing us—I think everyone’s missing the big picture here.”

“What’s the big picture?” they asked.

“I mean, think about the plants, right? There’s ferns and moss in some places and nothing but cacti and brush in others, because some places have got more water than others. All sorts of plants for all sorts of environments.”

Auron nodded encouragingly. “Go on.”

“There’s just going to be two humans. Just two, that’s all, and they’re going to be the ones to multiply and populate the entire world. What if, say, all of them need the same amount of water to live, but there’s only so much space by the rivers and lakes? Can they even drink sea water? Most plants don’t take sea water.”

They squinted at him. “What are you saying?”

The words came tumbling out. They were blasphemy, he knew, even among the angels who were whispering. At this point, even Lucifer was still loyal to God. The central issue wasn’t that he and his armies hated Her, it was that they wanted to be near Her like the higher angels and the future souls of dead humans. So every particle of light in Crowley’s celestial body shook as he said, “Whatever God has planned for these humans, I don’t think it’s good for them, either.”

Crowley wasn’t the only angel to question the goodness of God, or even the first to voice it in private. At that first meeting with the other future demons of Hell, he could only be certain that Auron was the first angel to bring it up within earshot in the crowded square of the Silver City where they’d all gathered.

Until the Third Rebellion, there was no reason for Auron’s name to appear in any history books. The First Rebellion in Heaven ended up being something like an aristocratic separatist movement, and had either Crowley or Auron made a significant contribution to the Second Rebellion they would still be languishing in the Pit at the time of this history. Crowley appears in the Bible twice, neither by name, but until Armageddon and his part in the Third Rebellion there was no reason for him to be mentioned in revolutionary history, either. But, with the hindsight of history, it is easy to see that the two great sparks of the Third Rebellion were cast off the flint that night in the Silver City.

Not that Crowley knew any of this as he told Aziraphale his tale. What he remembered was how naïve he was, letting himself get carried away by the heady feeling of everyone agreeing with him.

Another thing was born that night, a lesson Crowley was still living by as he told Aziraphale his story. When Lucifer got up and said all the things the lower angels had been saying, he felt the same sense of wrongness he had felt when he noticed the difference between Eden and deserts. The Lightbringer didn't say anything the lower angels hadn't said, but it sounded different coming out of his mouth. Crowley couldn't help wondering what this Seraph had to gain from supporting those below him, or why it was only he and his followers in the upper Spheres who were expressing these doubts.

Conflicts like this don't happen because of one single inciting incident. Tensions mount, tempers rise, and eventually things explode. Crowley didn't have to tell Aziraphale what had happened next. Aziraphale had been too disinterested in Lucifer's plays for power to notice much of the buildup, but he'd taken part in the War same as Crowley.

There are, however, two things that the reader might find of interest that Crowley didn't have to tell Aziraphale. First, the way everyone in Heaven and Hell remembers it, the First Rebellion began on the Third Day with a work stoppage. Every angel of the Third Sphere who was a follower of Lucifer halted the construction of their stars and supernovae, and their Second and First Sphere comrades flew to their sides to stand with them. Second, it was an undeniable fact that the first proverbial shots were fired when Heaven realized it couldn’t get its angels back to work except by force. [6]

When Michael came forward with his armies and Lucifer commanded those loyal to him to take up arms, many defected. Plenty of angels had their doubts, but there was a difference between staging a peaceful protest and the unprecedented act of taking up arms against the structures God Herself had set up. Crowley very nearly defected back to God's side himself.

He begged Auron to come with him. "This is wrong, Nasael, I can feel it. Lucifer's just using us, he just wants an army so he can be the angel closest to God."

"Michael is the one forcing Lucifer to make us into an army," they whispered back to him. "If you go over there, you'll have to fight us. You'll be fighting me. Do you want that?"

Crowley took their hand in his. "You could come with me."

But their faith was absolute. "Hanael," they said, "this is so much bigger than just Lucifer. Look around at your fellow angel. Think of those humans who are going to suffer under God. We're not doing this for the Lightbringer, we're doing this for all of them. All of us."

There was a great battle among the stars, and Lucifer and his forces lost and were cast into the lake of fire they'd later name the Pit.

In those first moments in Hell, when the new demons had pulled themselves out of the Pit onto the shores of their eternal prison, Crowley understood that faith. An angel could always feel the warmth of God's Light and bask in the connected, collective holiness of the other angels that made up the Host, but that had been torn from the angels who fell. Now he felt cold on a level deeper than the heat of Hell could penetrate, and when he reached out his essence to feel for his fellow angel he only found voids as deep and dark as his own.

He and Auron clung to each other. The gaping holes in their beings melded together and left Crowley with a dizzying sense of vertigo, but God hadn't taken his ability to touch away and his need for contact overrode his horror. They stood in each other's arms and listened as Lucifer spoke of the new world they were going to build in this dark and dreadful place. And in that moment, fumbling into the optimism that would later keep him alive and out of Hell, Crowley chose to believe him when he never had before.

Their new king's first command was to build two great cities, Dis and Pandemonium. This was when the hierarchy of Hell formed, and naturally this was when the new trouble started.

A loose military hierarchy had formed during the War, mostly along Choir lines with a few exceptions where a lower angel showed particular leadership skills, and here was another opportunity for fallen angels who lacked military prowess to rise above the stations they’d held in Heaven. Unfortunately, this was generally achieved using manipulation and brutality to keep the workers in line as they built the cities up. Conditions were harsh, and the demons who didn't have the skill or the stomach to rise up grew tired of their treatment. Most were too afraid, but some gathered together and rebelled again.

Auron came to Crowley as the whispers of dissent grew louder. Many of the friends they'd fallen with were preparing to take up arms, and they knew Crowley was facing just as much pressure to join up as they were, and, well, they trusted Crowley to be honest. It was the thing they'd always admired the most about him.

And Crowley was tired. He was constantly being threatened and beaten, called by a name that he hated because he could no longer say his own, and his faith had just been shattered twice. "I think it's a stupid idea," he told them, "and the Lords of Hell aren't going to let this rebellion stand."

He was right, in the end. After the Second Rebellion was crushed, a prison was constructed in the Pit and the rebels were condemned to suffer there until the End of Days. Part of Crowley was relieved he’d dodged that bullet, and another part of him never quite forgave himself for that. He wasn't entirely sure Auron ever forgave him, either, but then he hadn't quite forgiven Auron for convincing him to stay on Lucifer's side of things. Besides, with most of their friends in the Pit they were more or less all the other had.

Things got worse for the demons who weren’t thrown into the Pit. Everyone was desperate to prove their loyalty and strength, both to fill in the power vacuums left by the rebel demons and to keep from being crushed by an increasingly distrustful aristocracy. The new party line coming down from the higher ups was that demons should be uniting against their true enemies, Heaven and God's favorite creations, the humans. They'd snatch the humans from Heaven by tempting them into sin, subject them to the same torments to which God had subjected Her angels, and when they were broken use their souls to build up an army. The lowest of the fallen angels jumped onto this, eager to have a new rank of demon that was lower than them.

Aziraphale had an old pendulum clock on the wall of his backroom. It swung back and forth, the ticking sound filling the silence as Crowley took a deep breath and gathered himself.

"I didn't say anything, that time," he said, sounding drained. "I couldn't, right? I saw what happened to demons who said anything about what was going on. Better to keep my head down and keep out of the Pit. I think that scared Auron, seeing me like that. When they asked for volunteers to go up to Earth, they challenged me to a fight and—I mean, I knew they didn't really want to fight me. It was a play to get me out of Hell, because they couldn't stand watching what it was doing to me, I guess. They let me win, and I got to go up." He gave Aziraphale a small smile. "Then I met you."

Aziraphale returned the smile sadly. "Then I'm grateful to them."

"Yeah," he grunted, his smile fading. "I was offered a barony for the apple thing, you know. Turned it down. It was a huge insult, actually. It got me in a lot of the higher ups' bad books. [7] But I think Mammon believed I really did stab Auron in the back to get up to Earth in the first place, so when she saw through the fact that I wanted to stay up here I think she just assumed I wanted away from the infighting and decided I'd be useful if she could hold a potential return to Hell over my head. So, er, yeah. Got all that?"

"It's a lot to process, my dear," said Aziraphale. "But, yes, I think I understand it well enough that I don't need any clarification. So it was Auron you ran into. Did they do something?"

He told them about the imps in the pub, and the conversation in his flat. "I don't know what to do," he said. "When this hits, I'm worse than dead."

Aziraphale leaned across the sofa and put a hand to the nape of Crowley's neck. "You don't know what's going to happen," he said, stroking his hair. "For all you know this is going to be as much of a flash in the pan as the last rebellion."

"Maybe," said Crowley gloomily. "Maybe not."

"There's nothing you can do but wait and see," he said gently.

Crowley let out a heavy sigh. "I suppose you're right." He met Aziraphale's eyes. He looked tired, and he looked scared. "I think I just want to sleep, now," he said. He gave him a wry smile. "Between the torture, bumping into Auron, and telling you all that, I think I've earned it, don't you?"

Aziraphale kissed him and took his hand. "Off to bed with us, then, my dear."

They went upstairs to the flat above the bookshop, and Aziraphale held him as he fell asleep. He still wasn't in the habit himself, but even if he had been, he wouldn't have slept a wink that night. He'd never put much thought into what Hell must be like, not really. When he met Crowley he got curious, but after he was demoted for losing his sword the possibility of Hell became a bit more real for him and he couldn't bear to consider it in any great detail. He'd certainly never considered Crowley's place in its politics. Crowley existed on Earth; that was all that mattered to him.

Crowley had said Auron promised not to drag him into this, but Aziraphale didn't know that he could trust Auron. Furthermore, he wasn't certain he trusted Crowley not to throw himself into it, either. Crowley was a practical being with a good head on his shoulders, but Aziraphale knew that in his heart he was a rank sentimentalist. It was why Aziraphale loved him so much, after all. The problem was that now he was starting to suspect it might be the reason he was going to lose him, too.

* * *

[1] Actually, as a great philosopher once put it, everything is _sex_ , except sex, which is power. You know, power, which is sex.

[2] Written here in lowercase to distinguish them from the Archangels Michael, Gabriel, Uriel, and Raphael, four Thrones assigned special duties by God who, apart from a brief mention of Michael, will not be making any appearances in Crowley's personal history.

[3] Now, that was an awful lot for a dramatized historical narrative you're probably reading for entertainment purposes. For your convenience, below is a handy chart of the information just presented to you. Feel free to open it in another tab and refer back to it as needed. I know I did while writing this.

[4] Whether this means God never intended the angelic hierarchy as anything more than a logical way to organize angels to perform the work of Creation, and that it was the influence of angels who saw an opportunity to use the hierarchy to their own advantages, is not outside the realm of possibility. Just some food for thought.

[5] Incidentally, this makes every angel and demon of celestial stock a Libra.

[6] Which, were this a work of fiction written by an author with a penchant for jamming communist propaganda into everything she writes rather than the honest account of historical events that it actually is, would feel terribly on the nose. Although, even if it were a work of fiction that was steadfastly committed to not breaking the fourth wall, what other course of action might this hypothetical author have the rebel angels and their Heaven-sworn counterparts take? Having them escalate straight to violence when violence had literally never happened before would be nonsensical, whereas collectively bargaining using their labor as leverage would have been a the most logical thing to do. Since angels didn’t work for wages that might pay for food or shelter, Heaven’s only possible responses were to relent to the rebel angels’ demands or to resort to violent force. Maybe the rebels shooting first would make sense if Satan's evil nature was taken at face value, but that would be a pretty stale take on a story that's been told countless times over the last two thousand years. If this were a work of fiction, that is.

[7] Oh, you know.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> From the bottom of my heart, thank you so much for reading all that. I love each and every one of you.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Let's not talk about how long it's been lmao, I had a lot of travel to do and I finished a 90,000 word fanfic after that. Hope you all had a lovely fall and some lovely winter holidays!

Things were quiet, for a few weeks, but Crowley was well-conditioned not to take quiet as any sort of comfort. Worse yet, now that Aziraphale knew what was happening, he was treating him like he was made of fine china.

Crowley loved Aziraphale, he really did, but Aziraphale tended to react to other people's pain by trying to make it go away. That was one thing if it was a bike or a broken leg, but Crowley was a demon. His very existence was a punishment, and pain was as inevitable to a demon as damp was to the humans who lived around them in London. It wasn't all torrential downpours like Hastur, but there was always a layer of humidity over Crowley's world threatening to make the carpets smell musty, so to speak. Being damned meant having a gaping wound in your soul [1] that never healed, or having to look for rosaries, hamsa, or nazar hanging from rear view mirrors before hailing a cab. It wasn't fun, but it was something you had to get used to because there really wasn't any other choice.

Obviously Aziraphale knew all that, even if they'd never sat down and talked about it. It was useful for an angel to be able to sense a fellow celestial being missing their Grace, both so that they could identify demons and so that they could understand what becoming a demon entailed. There had also been plenty of incidents such as the one in 1362 C.E., where he and Crowley had been shuffled into a church together during a particularly nasty January storm. He'd had to watch Crowley discorporate from holiness-induced heat stroke because, delirious as he'd already been from the cold, he'd decided at least the church was warm and Hell was warmer.

The condition of Crowley's soul was easy enough to ignore, and the effect human wards had on Crowley wasn't hard to avoid, so it wasn't usually a problem between the two of them. But when the downpours came, Crowley needed a place to warm his bones and dry off. If Aziraphale didn't know it was raining, he was always happy to let Crowley inside and make him a cup of tea; if he did, however, his first instinct was always to grab an umbrella and stand outside making pitiful faces while Crowley's jacket soaked through.

It wasn’t that Crowley felt he couldn’t rely on Aziraphale, exactly. They’d known each other for six thousand years. Aziraphale had been there for him through war and plague and the deaths of countless humans Crowley had loved in one way or another; now that they shared a bed more often than not, Crowley always had someone there to hold him when he woke from yet another nightmare. When it was something Aziraphale could understand, Crowley was more than happy to let him take on his load. Aziraphale just didn’t understand Hell—partly because he’d spent all his life in denial about various aspects of it, partly because Crowley had never made much of an effort to tell him about it.

So, alright, maybe he should have told Aziraphale what was going on that first time he returned from Hell. It was just that he’d taken a few days to lick his wounds, and Aziraphale had started worrying and come to his door and he’d been so cross. His dithering, stubborn, bastard, perfect angel had stood there in Crowley’s doorway berating him for sleeping past the time they’d set for their date by three days, and it after going through Hell it felt as cozy as if Aziraphale had gotten under a blanket with him to thaw the chill in his bones. And it wasn’t fair, they weren’t meant to keep secrets anymore, but Crowley knew this performance evaluation thing was going to last until Hell found a way to do away with him forever, and the way he saw it he needed to enjoy Aziraphale as fully as he could while it was still possible.

He hadn’t been wrong to worry about it, he thought glumly to himself as they sat through yet another silent dinner together. Crowley had taken to suggesting they go out for meals, because the din of their fellow diners’ conversation was better than sitting silently together save for the scraping of cutlery against plates. They couldn’t even have music at home, because it made Aziraphale nervous. Aziraphale. As if he was the one getting calls from Hell.

No, no, that wasn’t fair. Aziraphale had only just found out that was such a constant in Crowley’s life; Crowley’d had five years to get used to it. He swallowed his bite of pork chop and cleared his throat. “Have you caught the trailer for _Golden Eye_ on television yet?”

Aziraphale furrowed his brow. “Have you been watching television? Aren’t you worried?”

He bit back a snippy remark and gave Aziraphale the most casual shrug he could muster. “They’ll find a way to talk to me regardless. Besides, I had to tape _Frasier_ for you last night.”

“My dear, you really didn’t have to do that,” said Aziraphale in a hushed, worried tone.

Crowley bit his tongue again and smiled. “I’m happy to, angel. It’s… nice to do something normal.” Then he took a deep breath, and he tried again. “So have you seen it?”

“ _Frasier_? No, not yet. I assume you taped it so we could both watch.”

“No, the _Golden Eye_ trailer.”

“What on earth is _Golden Eye_?” asked Aziraphale. He was starting to sound irritated, like he was offended Crowley expected him to know about whatever this trailer was.

Finally, they were getting somewhere. Crowley let the smile drop and frowned. “Come on, angel, you know. I’ve been back and forth to Los Angeles for ages trying to get this thing off the ground.”

“Oh. Well, I knew it had something to do with Hollywood, but I’ll admit I couldn’t remember the name. Is it for work?”

“It’s James Bond!” he said incredulously. “The new James Bond with Pierce Brosnan! It’s been in development hell since before Armageddon and I’ve been working my tail off on it.”

There. He’d guilted Aziraphale a little for forgetting, and now Aziraphale was going to get all huffy that Crowley expected him to remember something as absurd as James Bond, or he’d make a reference thirty years out of date and several degrees off from the actual content of the original films, but either way it would turn into a proper argument. Not a real one, nothing nasty or personal. Aziraphale would go on about how mindless action films are, Crowley would get in a few digs at Aziraphale’s repressed period dramas and Richard Attenborough documentaries, and then they’d finish their meal and drive home as the argument carried on until they got back to Crowley’s for a few drinks and a good shag. It was perfect, and they’d finally get to blow off steam from the last few weeks.

But that wasn’t what happened. Aziraphale looked ready to make some defensive point about scantily-clad women or shoe guns, but then the lines of his face smoothed and he said, “I’m sorry, dearest. I should have remembered.”

Crowley picked up his wine glass and took a generous swig. “No, you shouldn’t have!” he snapped. “When have you ever, _ever_ remembered that sort of thing, Aziraphale?”

Aziraphale put his fork down, hurt etched across his face. “I’m sorry, Crowley.”

“No, no, angel.” Crowley took Aziraphale’s hand from across the table. “I don’t want you to be sorry. I just mean that I’m used to it. It’s normal. I _like_ that you don’t give a shit about James Bond, alright?” He took a deep breath. “Look, I know you mean well, but right now everything with work is horrible and I don’t know what’s going to happen next, so I need this”— he gestured between the two of them—“to be normal.”

Aziraphale squeezed his hand and met his eyes through his sunglasses. “I’m sorry, my dear,” he said again. “I’ll try.”

“No, okay, see, that’s the problem. You’re just giving in. I mean, are you upset? Do you think I’m being flippant about it?”

“I suppose I do,” Aziraphale admitted, “but I don’t want to argue with you, my dear boy. Not when I’m not certain how much time we have left.”

“Why not? Arguing’s our thing, angel. It’s the entire foundation of our relationship. Our love is a single argument carried out for millennia since more or less the dawn of time.” He smiled. “It’s why I did what I did to get into this predicament with Hell in the first place. I didn’t want it to stop.”

Aziraphale smiled at him, and then he sniffed. “Well,” he said, “I suppose I do tend to go off into my own world when you’re on about one of your… _films_.” He wrinkled his nose with distaste.

Crowley smiled back. “Right,” he said, “because watching you fan yourself like an old woman looking at Colin Firth in a wet linen shirt in the _Pride and Prejudice_ adverts is the picture of good taste.”

It was a good night. It was a good morning, too. They started slow, then crawled out of bed so that Aziraphale could make coffee and Crowley could make eggs. [2] For the first time since Crowley’s last performance eval and his encounter with Auron, things were alright. So, naturally, that was when Hell called through the television Aziraphale had so magnanimously suggested they let play in the background as they puttered. [3]

Crowley stood frozen in place where he’d been when the call came, leaning on the kitchen counter. He glanced at Aziraphale, and Aziraphale glanced back from the sink where he was putting their mugs and plates. He looked just as afraid as Crowley was, but he got up and put an arm around Crowley. “We’ve got two hours. How long do you need to get Down There from London?”

“One,” he said quietly, his voice shaking.

Aziraphale kissed his temple. “It’s sunny out. Why don’t we walk you to the entrance?”

They cut through Hyde Park on the way to Knightsbridge, Aziraphale stopping to point out different birds far more often than Crowley would prefer on a normal day. He didn’t mind it now. Anything to keep his mind off what was about to happen. Aziraphale put on a fantastic show, and if Crowley hadn’t turned back once at the tunnel entrance to see Aziraphale’s face he wouldn’t have known Aziraphale was still worried, too.

Crowley’s punishment was secret, so he always had to find the dank basement in Pandemonium that Hastur had set up as his own personal torture chamber. All the while he had to look normal for the other demons. A lot of the other demons tended to stare at him anyway, since he was the demon who’d thwarted Armageddon and all, but today there were more of them. This, he decided, was not good news for him.

Hastur was getting quite good at torturing Crowley specifically. He was a master of it in general, of course; that was how he’d become a Duke in the first place. But he’d started reading Crowley’s reports, and his torture had taken on the worst aspects of both the medieval and the modern. All the old standbys like thumbscrews and iron maidens were there, because Hastur could heal the effects of those in a heartbeat, but worse than that was the environment he’d set up. He cycled the temperature in the room so that Crowley was in and out of his various physical reactions to the cold, and he’d taken to wearing earplugs and playing one song over and over again. This time, it was _Scatman (Ski Dop Ba Bop Ba Dop Bop)_ by Scatman John. [4]

Time dragged on, as it always seemed to in Hell. Crowley had his tricks for getting through the worst of it, all of which Hastur knew how to circumvent or wear down eventually. It is not relevant to this history what happened to Crowley. All that matters is that it was bad, and that while he couldn’t tell the time, he know it was rather early in the review session when the door to the basement burst open.

“Lord Hastur,” said a low, familiar voice, “change of plans. Release him and heal him, please.”

Crowley stared up at the top of the stair from where he was strapped to the rack, and he chided himself for thinking Mammon looked like an intervening angel descending from Heaven. Too much human media, he supposed, and he was more than a little delirious.

“Yes, Highness,” Hastur muttered, going up to Crowley and unstrapping his wrists. “I hope she’s got something worse in store for you, Crawly,” he whispered, his stagnant breath blowing hot through Crowley’s hair.

He shuddered once, and then he hissed loudly as Hastur healed his wounds. He was still sluggish from the cold, so he sat up slowly and more or less shambled his way to the stair. It didn’t occur to him until he’d reached Mammon at the top that this was probably bad news for him, and it became even harder to stay upright as she led him out. He stumbled once, and she offered him an arm, smiling sharply.

“Now, now,” she said, “pull yourself together. You and I have got a lot to discuss.”

He was too dazed and too busy watching the ground for obstacles to know how they got to Mammon’s tower. They hadn’t gone outside, so they must have gone through some tunnels Crowley hadn’t known existed before. Not that he spent enough time in Hell for that to be something he might know about, but it was interesting enough to break through the general fog of his terror.

Mammon had a private lift to her office, too, and it wasn’t long before Crowley was sat back at her desk again, Mammon smiling across from him.

“How have your performance reviews been going?” she asked sweetly.

It took a few tries before Crowley managed to stammer, “F-fine.”

She beamed. “Good. You’re handling them very well, I daresay. I think a lesser demon would have broken years ago. But, then, you always did draw strength from your life on earth. And I notice you’ve been branching out socially, too.” Her grin took on a dangerous edge. “Getting in touch with old friends.”

“I- I… I don’t…” He swallowed. “Sssssorry?”

“That was you who met with the demon Auron at the Black Goat, wasn’t it?”

Crowley sat up, his cold-stiffened muscles protesting at the speed he demanded from them. “I didn’t meet up with him, Highnesssss, I ssssssss—” He shut his mouth and switched to DSL. [5] He could tell he was starting to panic, and there was no getting around his hissing in that state. “We just ran into each other,” he continued, his hands flying. “They said ‘hi,’ that was all.”

“Funny, the two of you being at the Black Goat on the same night. I understand you’re not much of a regular there.”

“Maybe they’ve been going there a lot, I don’t know,” signed Crowley desperately. “It was a coincidence.”

She raised an eyebrow. “And that’s nothing to do with the fact that you openly defied Hell to prevent our victory in Armageddon? I’m sure Auron just _loves_ what you did at that human airbase.”

“Maybe they do, lord, I don’t know. I was there to drink off my punishment, that’s all.”

Mammon sat back, her eyes skeptical as that smile remained plastered to her face. “A lot of demons love what you did, Crowley. Even the imps. Especially the imps. You saved their old home, after all.”

Crowley swallowed. “I saw… Everyone in the pub was looking at me. I’m sure your informants can vouch for the look on my face when I guessed why. I haven’t been stirring any of this up, my lord, I swear. I don’t care what happens in Hell, I just want to stay on Earth.” He wasn’t lying, exactly, but after his conversation with Auron he couldn’t help feeling a surge of guilt.

His guilt doubled as Mammon’s smile finally softened. “I thought you’d say that. I have a proposal for you, Crowley, and I think you’re going to like it.”

He cleared his throat and decided to try speaking again. “Yeah?” he squeaked.

“I’m sorry, Crowley. I just needed to be sure of you,” she said, her words punctuated with an indulgent laugh. She reached behind her and grabbed a decanter of what looked like honest-to-badness Scotch, plus two glasses. She poured one for Crowley and pushed it toward him. “Here. This is how they calm their nerves on Earth, isn’t it?”

“Thanksss,” he said, taking the glass. He sniffed it and was shocked to discover that it was, in fact, Scotch. Quite a nice Scotch, too. He sipped it gratefully.

“You may not have been seeking Auron out, but Auron was clearly seeking you. They like to make trouble—well, the sort of trouble we don’t like, anyway—and if they could get you in on whatever it is they’re planning, they could recruit an awful lot of demons to their side. So my thinking is, if they’re slinking around trying to draw you back into that circle, why not use that to both our advantages?”

To his own credit, Crowley didn’t let his drink go down the wrong pipe. He swallowed and concentrated on getting his next words out without hissing. “You want me to spy for you?”

She nodded. “You like spies, don’t you? I know you’ve been putting in a lot of work on that film in Hollywood. You get to live out what you've been projecting onto human screens, and if you're serving me directly I see no reason why your performance reviews should continue. It's a win/win for you.”

Crowley couldn’t remember any Bond films where 007 got up to any union busting, but it wasn’t as though he could say no. Of course he couldn’t say no, everyone in Hell was waiting for an excuse to toss him into eternal agony and never think about him again. If he refused, his loyalties would be suspect and Mammon would probably drop him in the Pit like a puppy being brought back to the shelter for pissing on the rug. And not a nice shelter, either. A proper pound like something out of a children’s film.

Still, he didn’t know if he could betray Auron like that. He’d spent most of his life as a demon trying to convince people like Mammon that he could, but all that had been pretend. Auron had wanted him to hurt them in that fight for the scouting assignment, he hadn’t thought eating a piece of fruit was enough to get all of humanity expelled from Paradise, and even if he’d known the Spanish Inquisition was happening, he wouldn’t have thought to claim credit for it until after Hell approached him. But Mammon thought he was responsible for all that and more, and the Crowley she knew would have no qualms about stabbing a friend in the back like that to save his own hide.

He smiled, looking snakelike and devious as his stomach churned. “Well, if that’s all it takes,” he said, “I accept.”

* * *

[1] Not that demons have souls, or angels for that matter, but at this point both Crowley and Aziraphale were attached enough to their earthly corporations that one could make a philosophical argument that what most celestial beings might call, "I don't know, my ‘me,’ I guess," could count as a soul for these two in particular.

[2] He did this by hand rather than manifesting them. It was very romantic, especially when he caught that they were overcooked and miracled them to the right level of doneness before Aziraphale could notice.

[3] Willy Roper from _Eastenders_ seemed to take considerable pleasure in summoning Crowley back Downstairs.

[4] Ironically, four years later “Scatman John Paul Larkin would join Elgar and Liszt in Heaven. He’d done some living, to be sure, but he’d used the final years of his life to sing about overcoming his stammer and promoting world peace. He died surrounded by family and beloved all the world over, particularly in Japan.

[5] Demonic Sign Language. Crowley’s eyes, cold-bloodedness, and speech impediment were all a curse from God as a direct punishment for his temptation of Eve. They became a sort of status symbol for him among his fellow demons, even after he turned down his promotion, and soon the higher-ups in Hell started making trips up to Earth to try and get punished themselves in order to save face. Beelzebub saw the most success, having taken the form of a fly to whisper in Cain’s ear, but after zir punishment God got wise and just started sending angels to beat the demons up instead. Beelzebub’s curse had a similar effect on Hell as Louis XIV’s anal fistula had on France, and suddenly everyone who was anyone was sporting animal traits and speech impediments despite having never set foot on Earth. Crowley appreciated how much easier DSL made his life when he just couldn’t talk past his sibilants, but he couldn’t help resenting that it only became a thing because a prince needed it.


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Let's! Move! The plot! Forward!

Patience was a virtue that Aziraphale had never quite perfected. He did persistence nicely,[1] but at least persistence had a direction. True patience, patience without a plan or a promise, eluded him. And, after the hell that Hell had put Crowley through in the last few weeks, he was growing tired of trying to be patient as he waited to learn whether to expect Crowley back on Earth. It occurred to him that no news was probably bad news, but he couldn’t afford to hold that thought in his head for long.

So, he kept busy. He went to a few of his favorite restaurants he knew Crowley wasn’t keen on, he fed the ducks, he performed miracles wherever he went. But, after a day of that, he couldn’t face going back to his shop knowing he couldn’t so much as call Crowley to wish him goodnight. So, not knowing where else to go, he went to Crowley’s flat.

He parked on Crowley’s leather sofa and waited through the night and into the morning, gripping the book tightly in his hand and trying not to hear his favorite person’s return in every footstep in the building or slam of a car door outside. So, naturally, it was when he’d finally settled into his book that the door to Crowley’s flat opened, sending Aziraphale flying out of his seat and the book sliding across the room.

Crowley was standing in the doorway, leaning heavily against the frame and staring at his unexpected visitor. “Hi,” he said stiffly.

“Oh, Crowley.”

Aziraphale was with him in an instant, clutching him tightly to his chest. He was fussing, he knew, but he didn’t care and Crowley didn’t seem to mind, either. The poor thing was exhausted and visibly shaken, so Aziraphale took him to the sofa and laid his head in his lap, stroking his hair until he was ready to talk.

Crowley told Aziraphale what he’d been asked to do.

“I’m fucked,” he said. “Absolutely buggered.”

Aziraphale took in a sharp breath. “But this is a good thing,” he said hopefully, “isn’t it?”

He stared up at him, bare-eyed, doubt etched all across his face. “Enlighten me, angel, how the hell is this a good thing?”

“Well, you don’t want the union, do you?”

“I never said that. A union’d be great, actually. It’s the process of forming one that’s got me worried. I wanted to plug my ears until it went away, not be a plant from the bosses.”

He took a deep breath, his nostrils flaring slightly as he considered what to say next.

Since Almostgeddon, the two of them had done more than their fair share of pondering the ineffable. Crowley had hit on his conclusion that Sunday in the park, that one day it would be “all of Us against all of Them.” Aziraphale wasn’t so certain.

Crowley loved humans with all his heart, and Aziraphale adored him for it. He just also felt it was something of a blind spot for him, because for all humans were wonderful, they didn’t exactly have a say in how the universe functioned. Only God had that. You could debate how much God exercised that say, or whether Her Plan was right or wrong, or what that Plan even was, but at the end of the day what mattered was that She held the cards. Hell could oppose Her, but only because she’d created a Hell to put her enemies into in the first place.

For Aziraphale, this wasn’t a matter of pride or faith. Faith was for humans, and it would have been foolish to take pride in Heaven after everything he went through just a few years prior. No, Aziraphale believed in God’s supremacy the way he believed in the law of gravity. And, come to think of it, God could probably rewrite that if She wanted to.

He understood now that Heaven’s will didn’t necessarily reflect God’s will, but Heaven and Hell were structures She’d put in place. Heaven was made to serve Her, and Hell was made to punish those who disobeyed Her and keep those who served Her in line.

As blasphemous as it felt to admit even now, after everything, it wasn’t all that different from the way humans kept each other in line. Give any thinking creature an inferior, an enemy, someone to look at and think, “There but for the grace of God go I,” and they’ll spend all their time fighting to keep what little power they have instead of demanding more from the people who have virtually all of it.

That was what Hell was for angels. It was a prison whose inmates were cut off from God’s light, who could be eradicated in a way no angel could with enough holy power. Perhaps Hell thought they’d made a break with Heaven, but you didn’t have to be close to a demon to know Heaven’s power could reach Hell even if the warmth of God’s light couldn’t. Aziraphale did know a demon, though, so he only had to look into Crowley’s eyes for proof of that.

When Crowley had told him the Antichrist was earth and he’d told Crowley that Heaven was going to win, he wasn’t saying it out of faith or devotion. He was saying it simply because he knew it to be true. He knew it as surely as he knew that Heaven would never allow Hell to improve itself, because Heaven needed Hell so that it could keep its angels in line.

Crowley had already drawn Heaven’s wrath once since his fall. Aziraphale wasn’t going to let it happen again. So he steeled himself, and he told him what he thought he needed to hear.

“My dear,” he said, “even if this hadn’t been dropped into your lap, your fate would have been tied to the union’s success or failure. You did a brave thing going against Hell. You’ve made your impact, and unfortunately that’s made you into something of a symbol. Now, if the union is destined to fail, who are you helping by going down with it?”

“Does that matter?” Crowley asked, exasperated. “It’s still wrong.”

“There’s a lot we’ve had to do over the years that was wrong.” He took Crowley’s hand and pulled it up to his mouth, kissing it. “You stayed out of that first rebellion in Hell and survived, and the Earth still exists in part because of you. If you don’t do as Mammon says, there’s only one thing that can happen to you. And I think you’ll do a lot more good surviving than you will playing the martyr.”

Crowley snorted. “I suppose playing the martyr is a bad look for a demon.”

“And it’s for the greater good,” Aziraphale continued, feeling encouraged. “All Hell wants is for the union to go away and for things to go back to normal. And you don’t even have to hurt anyone, you can find ways to protect people.”

“Right,” said Crowley, uncertainly.

“And, honestly, my dear, nobody else is going to make that effort for the demons you’re spying on. If it isn’t you, Mammon can get somebody who doesn’t care.”

Crowley shifted his head uncomfortably. “I suppose that’s true.”

Aziraphale let go of his hand and placed a finger under Crowley’s chin, tilting his head back so that their eyes met. “Besides, my dear,” he said, “it would be awfully sad if you left me up here alone after everything we’ve been through.”

* * *

Crowley went down to the Black Goat, trying to keep Aziraphale’s points in his head. This was for the greater good. All Hell wanted was for the union to go away and for things to go back to normal. He could do this without hurting anyone. It wouldn’t help anybody if Mammon tossed him in the Pit and someone else who didn’t care took his place. If he didn’t do this, he’d leave Aziraphale alone forever.

He stood across the street, staring at the pub, and lit a cigarette hoping he could calm his nerves. When that cigarette was spent he lit another one, and then another for luck, and one more to grow on.

“Crowley?”

He yelped and nearly dropped his fourth cigarette, and then yelped again as he burned his hand in the process of catching it. Biting his tongue through the pain, he healed the burn and turned to face Auron. “Auron,” he said, leaning against the wall, cool as a cucumber. “What a ssssssss—a-a sss _surprisssse_!”

Auron put their hands up and took a placating step forward, like he was approaching a frightened animal.[2] “Sorry, I didn’t mean to frighten you.”

“Pfffft!” Crowley scoffed. “Don’t be ridiculous. I’m fine!”

They blinked. “Okay. Well, you’ve been out here for an hour. Were you going to come in?”

“Er.” Crowley glanced at the pub and took a drag from his cigarette, taking the time to steady himself. It wouldn’t help anyone if he was thrown into the Pit, he reminded himself. “I was thinking about it.”

“Really?” asked Auron, giving him a significant look.

He glowered from behind his sunglasses. “Oh, don’t look so pleased with yourself. Yeah. I reconsidered—I _am_ reconsidering.”

Auron was doing a bad job suppressing their smile. “Why the sudden open mind?”

Crowley had prepared for this, practiced his answer with Aziraphale. This was for the greater good. “I’ve got a… _someone_ , here on Earth. He found out what was happening to me. Him not knowing let me pretend it wasn’t real, but once he knew I couldn’t ignore it anymore.”

“Oh,” said Auron, looking shocked. “So this person is your… what, your friend? Your lover?”

“I’d like to keep my private life private, if it’s all the same to you,” Crowley snapped. He shut his eyes. If he didn’t do this, he’d leave Aziraphale alone forever.

“I need to know what he knows, Crowley. Is he a demon?”

“No. Not much chance of him ever going to Hell, either. He’s safe.”

Auron sighed. “I suppose I’ll have to trust you there.”

They stood together in silence, looking at each other.

“You know,” said Auron, “after our last conversation, I really thought you’d given up on Hell for good. I know Earth has always seemed like the only option for you, but I can’t tell you what it means to me that you haven’t forgotten all of us down Below.”

All Hell wanted was for the union to go away and for things to go back to normal. He could do this without hurting anyone. This was for the greater good. “Stop. _Stop it_. I can’t do this. Auron, I’m lying to you.”

“What?”

“I didn’t change my mind. I’m here to spy on you.”

Auron stared at him. “Well,” they said, “you’re not doing a very good job of it.”

“Yeah, no shit,” he muttered. He dropped his cigarette and doused it underfoot. When he lifted his foot back up, the butt had disappeared. “You were right. You were the only one who offered me a choice.”

Auron stepped forward and put a hand on his shoulder. “And I understand the position you’ve been put in. I can feed you whatever you need to give to Mammon to get her to leave us alone. We’re still offering you a choice.”

“Well, now it’s not a choiccccce anymore, is it?” Crowley seethed, glaring.

Auron raised an eyebrow. “Forgive me, I thought you _chose_ to tell me the truth.”

Crowley glanced at the hand on his shoulder and took a deep breath. “Yeah,” he said. “I guess you’ve got me there.”

Auron let go of Crowley’s shoulder and offered him his hand. “So you’re in?”

Hesitantly, Crowley took it. “Sure,” he sighed. “I guess so.”

Auron’s face lit up with a dimpled grin. “Welcome back to the fight, old friend.”

* * *

“A _double agent?!_ ” Aziraphale shouted.

“I have to have something to tell Mammon,” Crowley protested, “and Auron wasn’t letting me in on any meetings once the cat was out of the bag.”

“That is beside the point, Crowley. You agreed that you were going to play by the rules and then put this behind you, and now you’ve gone back on that and put yourself in danger again.”

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I know,” he said. “I tried, angel, I really did, but I couldn’t go through with it.”

Aziraphale pinched the bridge of his nose. “Don’t be sorry,” he said, trying desperately not to sound insincere.[3] “I’m reacting emotionally to a frightening situation. You listened to your conscience and came clean to me about your change of plans immediately. That’s a _good_ thing. You’re a good _person_ , and that is what I love about you.”

“Right,” said Crowley. “Okay. So we’re good, then.”

Aziraphale clenched his fist. “You don’t even want a union!” he blustered, snapping right back to shouting.

“Well, it’s done now, isn’t it?” Crowley shouted back. “This is the only thing I can do.”

“But we talked about this, you knew what the only thing you could do was! This should have been second nature to you. You’re a demon. For six thousand years, lying to do something you feel is wrong has been your _whole job_.”

“But this isn’t a job, Aziraphale, this is my life! This is my whole bloody life, alright? Maybe I’m sick of my job being to lie and scheme and using humans and demons I care about as a stepladder to keep myself out of Hell.”

“I don’t want to lose you. It’s going to end badly, Crowley.”

“But what if it doesn’t? What if it goes _well_ , angel? Maybe it’s never worked before in Hell, but it hadn’t worked for the humans, either, and they got there eventually, didn’t they? And their fight isn’t over, but it’s better. It’s a better life. And I want that, I want a life where I can just stay up here with you without looking over my shoulder wondering whether Hell’s going to swallow me up and snatch it all away. Imagine it, angel. Heaven’s already more or less leaving you alone. Even if Hell never really lets me go, at least it could be better. A little more free.”

Crowley had just given up any chance he’d ever had at being free, Aziraphale felt certain of that. Now, whatever happened next, Crowley was going to get caught up in it. If Hell didn’t find a way to punish him, Heaven would. Any day they had together might now be their last.

But, looking across his back room table at Crowley—eyes uncovered, as they so often were around him these days, and shining with that foolish hope Aziraphale so loved him for—he couldn’t bring himself to tell him that. Perhaps for the first time, he began to understand where that foolish hope came from. Crowley was a demon of Hell, as low as an angel could go before hitting the Pit. His only options were to hope or to let despair paralyze him.

The prospect of losing Crowley was threatening to paralyze Aziraphale with fear, now, he realized, and there was nothing he could ask Crowley to do now except move forward as though the world was better than it was.

He shut his eyes, breathing in and out as he once again redrew his mental map of the universe. When he opened his eyes, he gave Crowley a look of worn, melancholy affection. “You’re a sentimental old fool,” he said fondly.

Crowley relaxed against the back of his chair. “I know,” he said. And then he added, “Thank you, angel.”

Aziraphale considered asking him not to, but he decided against it. This whole optimism thing was going to take some practice.

* * *

[1]For example, he was still working on his magic act even five years after it nearly got several humans—and Crowley—killed at a children’s birthday party.

[2] In some ways, he was. Crowley’s mind was at all times a jumble of celestial, human, and snake instinct, and at that moment a particularly hognose part of his brain was trying to convince him that this would all go away if he’d simply collapse onto the pavement, wriggle around, and lie sprawled out on his back with his tongue stuck out until Auron decided he was dead and left him alone.

[3] In a way, he was succeeding. He was sincerely trying not to smite Crowley on the spot.

**Author's Note:**

> Find me on Tumblr at [crowleyraejepsen](https://crowleyraejepsen.tumblr.com)!


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